Elizabeth Edwards Loses Her Battle With Breast Cancer

By Cathy Chapman, Ph.D.
Elizabeth Edwards, the estranged wife of presidential candidate John Edwards, was diagnosed with cancer when her husband was the vice-presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2004. Elizabeth Edwards was on numerous talk shows and wrote several books about her struggles as a woman with cancer and, later, as a woman betrayed by a man who portrayed himself as a faithful family man. She passed away on December 7, 2010.

When you are in the public limelight, there is little hope of privacy. Your words and actions are interpreted and misinterpreted by anyone who has an opinion. I did not know the Edwards' family except through the media, but I do have an opinion as do many others.

People with cancer, or any catastrophic illness, need to do everything possible to strengthen their immune system. The following are recommendations on the emotional level to assist in this process:

Surround yourself with supportive peopleEliminate as much stress as possible, Release and let go the past,

The emotional work of healing is usually done privately. Elizabeth Edwards did not have that opportunity. Some of this was by choice. She said "yes" to the talk shows and she wrote the books. She was not the one who chose to have an affair and father a child.

I can't begin to imagine the emotional devastation she felt when it was confirmed that not only had her husband been lying about the affair, he had fathered a child. From the mind-body psychology perspective this also had to have devastated her immune system. At the time she was fighting to remain strong for her children and her husband, he was denying her in the arms of another woman.

From a therapist's perspective, he wasn't denying his wife, as much as it looked that way. He was attempting to find comfort. You could say that he was a very weak man who could not cope with his wife's illness in a healthy and adult manner.

Elizabeth Edwards must have been a woman of great strength. She struggled with anger, fear, despair and rage. She told Oprah she wanted to forgive her husband. I don't know if she accomplished that before her passing. The reports say that he was there at her bedside, with their children and her siblings, when she passed from this life to the next.

None of us knows how we will handle crisis until we are in the midst of them. Elizabeth Edwards had to face losing her entire life as she knew it. She had to face leaving her children motherless. Her husband had to face losing his wife. His fear of losing her, and his inability to be strong for her, ultimately resulted in his losing her much earlier than he needed to.

If William Shakespeare had written a tragedy about this family, it would be studied in universities. The fatal flaw of both would have produced books analyzing this tragedy. Instead of fiction, there is a family filled with pain at losing a mother and wife. There is a man who is filled with his own shame and regret that he couldn't be the man he wanted to be... and then there are the children who have to struggle with losing their mother and the image of the father they thought they knew.